Books With Bean ~ A to Z Mysteries: The Absent Author

Title: A to Z Mysteries: The Absent Author 

Author: Ron Roy

Published: 1997

Genre:  Children’s Early Chapter books, Mystery

Summary: Donald David Duncan better known to his friends as Dink is very excited. He wrote to his favorite author Wallis Wallace and Wallis Wallace agreed to come to Dink’s home town of Green Lawn to do a book signing. There is just one problem, when Dink and his best friends Josh and Ruth Rose get to the Book Nook, their local bookstore, for the signing Wallis Wallace is nowhere to be found! Reading over the last letter he got from Wallis Wallace, Dink is worried that his favorite author might have been kidnaped! Teaming up with his friends and a woman named Mavis Green who is a friend of Wallis Wallace, they try to find the missing author before anything bad happens.

What I liked about it: A to Z Mysteries were one of the first beginning chapter books I can remember reading and I remember loving them from the start. The smart and curious Dink, the goofy Josh and the independent Ruth Rose were always so fun and went on all sorts of cool adventures. They never got boring even in the most recent book published more then 20 years after the original. This is one of the few series that I started reading as a kid that is still being published that I still read to tell you how good it is! The books are clean, fun and full of adventure and mystery. 

Language: None

Romance: None

Violence: None

Magic: None, the series is done in the order of the alphabet and I remember mom was hesitant to let me read H, V and Z originally as they are the Haunted Hotel, the Vampire's Vacation and the Zombie Zone. However, I will let you know ahead of time theses books have nothing magic or even slightly supernatural about them. The hotel one turned out to be someone in a costume, the vampire is just a movie actor (who did play a vampire in a movie in their world) on vacation, and the Zombies are likewise not real and only people dressed up to scare locals away while they commit their crimes.

Recommended Age: The kids age a bit during the series and I would say they are good for 3rd grade on up. The kids have yet to age past 5th grade in the most recent book. If you have younger kids, the author also has books about the younger relations of the characters from the A to Z mysteries called the Calendar Mysteries which are good for K-2nd graders.